Does this mean the Earth will want to spin the other direction, or is the Earths spin controlled by other forces, and not magnatism? Besides, what magnetic pole is currently the positive side, and what is the negative side? Also, How would this affect the commercial airlines with their fancy expensive compases? Does it really matter considering that the Earth might have problems when the magetic sphere of protection lets the evil radiation monsters thru the window? We might all jsut get cancer and die, right?
yeah, I know its not on my end. I blasted my local cache, and I have control of the corprate proxy on the perimeter. So I duno, and I got a screen shot now to prove the non-belivers. The direct links work though.
I simply don't know why my browser (Linux-Mozzila on 4.7-stable) is not showing me the linkage. Oh well... I cleared my cache, and reloaded the page a few time just to make sure. I should make a screen shot to prove the na-sayers that I'm not blind!
Ah...NO... the links you mention do NOT exist. At least not that I can see in, or above, the 3rd step. For those that are wondering, the link above will warp you to a page with three steps: products, part#, and OS. Looking in the Linux area only shows stuff for Finux distro, and there is not mention of FreeBSD!
So at this point, this still looks like a hoax to me! However, is is well known that nvidia IS working on a FreeBSD native driver. It just doesn't look like its finished yet. No Nvidia people have posted anythign to the -STABLE mailling list yet. Mind you no employee's of Nvidia have. Other post's there could be from the same people trolling this hoax.
We BSD folk have been waitting for this, because we like to play Quake too! The bad part is where are the drivers? Nvidia's web page only show's the Finux variety. Hopefully the website will update soon. There is no mention of this on the FreeBSD -stable mail-list from any Nvidia folks, so I'm a bit skeptable. The only mention on the FreeBSD list thus far is also pointing to the same website, with not metion of FreeBSD driveres.
I fail to see how this is an issue when you use a non-Microsoft environment. Will the field service-dude know how to install this software under wine's emulation? Will he even know what wine is? Do I even have Wine installed? Is there a MAC or Unix version of these software tools? What about the possibility to format Windows imediatly after the service-man leaves the room?
Is this a notion of you must submit to the service man installing software before he leaves, or is this a notion of you must run this software to use the network? I think the later is highly unlikely, and the former to be part of the burocratic tangle inside the network companies.
Every time I call the cable company, I have to explain to them that my computer is a FreeBSD box with an AMD 100Mhz 486 chip with 64Mb of memory. Then they explain to me that they only support XYZ setup, and I have to explain to them that I'm talking about my router, and I have XYZ behind it. I thne have to explain to them the way DHCP works, and how that is all that they actually require. Once your have them spell bound with ignorant IP terminology, they tend to shutup and go away. I figure the same jedi mind trick can be done with the field service people.;)
The GPL might be good for the developer who writes the code originally, but it is bad for the public at large. You have to understand taht there is nothing inthe GPL that says I have to give you the source code for free! the condition is that i have to make the source code available, but not really for free download, or whatever. The code writen by goverment should have zero strings attached, as in a purely free license. After all, a license that has "requirements", and "conditions" is not free as in freedom, not in the true sense of the term. That is why the BSD style license is so good since it only exists to confirm the code is free (as in freedom), and the zero liability. I would think its is reasonable to say that goverment assigned contracts that involve the generation of source code should be mandated to use a goverment approved lisence that benifites the public. By "public" I also mean to include the commercial interest in our society. A goverment should nto have to make available changes or modifications to source code that it payed a contractor to write! Furthermore, a goverment should not release source code that forces it citizens to make changes available. Would these citizens being violating a stautory law, or a small-claims court battle with the US goverment? Don't get me wrong, the GPL isn't all bad. After all it does do what it designed to do very well; protect the selfish desire of the developers to steal that improvments that other people make to the code that appears to be available for free, but really isn't. =) The GPL is good for one thing, education. It is a good way to make code available so pople can read it, learn from it, and possibly write source code in the BSD license that is FREE, or NOT.
It just goes to show, if you cannot beat them; blur, subvert, entagle, go to bed with, and later on take a knife to their neck. This is one good way to get their roots into an otherwise concreate group who seem to stand firmly on open source. Heck, making Internet Explorer free (as in cost) utterly destroyed Netscape in the end, and now free (as in freedom) software is starting to destroy Microsoft. Kinda Ironic huh? Well it won't be so easy on this side of the camp for them to subvert. We can see it coming, and if Microsoft is so anti Finux, then why have a company contribute to that very same agenda they are scared of? Is this an "embrace, and exploite" method we have not seen before? Who knows, maybee MS will write their own Finux distro in the end! har... har..
I wonder what leagal ramifications this means to Sklyarov? IT is said that if he testifies i the case, his charges will be dropped! So if this is a tactic to force him NOT to testify, then the charges will be reinstated in full, and with extra penalties.
"If, however, Alexander and Dmitry are unable to come to trial at all, we are likely to face a host of legal issues, including constitutional issues," says Serebryanaya. She deferred further speculation, citing a preference to "cross that bridge if we come to it."
It is also said that the US State Dept. has no legal recource for refusing a visa, as in the Justice dept has no leverage with them to do anything. So thins might be Powell's way of asserting a forced verdict in this case. This might also set a precendence in the world-wide court, if we USA folks can procescute outsiders, yet we refuse these bad folks entry, what is the point? Guilty without trial?
your kinda right, er.... correct. FreeBSD has two systems of software distribution, ports, and packages. Ports is always a good thing if your into automation of downloading/checking for dependancies/building/installing software in its most fundamental way. Packages, on the other hand, have already been through that process, as in somebody (or you) has already compiled the source code into usable binary exacutable. The packages are more comparable to an RPM as they have the ability to check for dependancies for dynamically linked binaries, or whatever, and know how to install themselves. FreeBSD packages are every bit the equal of a RPM. The key differnce of your RPMs, and the FreeBSD ports/package collection is that FreeBSD is centralized. As in we have a big team of peopel that maintain the ports, and add new ports all the time. When software becomes a port, it also becomes a package since every freebsd port has the "make package" target in their Makefiles. When a new release of FreeBSD is about to be made public, the entire ports tree is compiled down into packages and put onto a set of cdroms. Well, not all the ports are, just the ones with licenses that permite such redistribution, currently over 8000 titles! PAckages are a nice way for administrators to build once, and install many places on their networks/clusters.
Interesting, it seems sun is going to sell SOlaris 9 for $99 USD. But what about all those grand plans they had for Linux? I mean, at one point Sun was going to make Linux kernel + Solaris userland to be the x86 mega system. That way Solaris on x86 would have all the advantages of open source driver development. Lets face it, this is a much better idea that the one currently being driven my Sun to sell Solaris 9 on Intel, and just continue to ride sick horse. Going down this path means more money is being spent at Sun on the Intel side of things, and that takes away from the Sparc side of stuff. Linux kernel already has like 10x more supported hardware that the Solaris kernel. Yeah, the Solaris engineers can look at the Linux kernel and reverse engineer code for their own, but isn't that just stupid when you could just have the linux kernel? Besides, the people who use x86 solaris is mainly schools that teach unix to students, and cannot afford a sparc box in front of each student, or some other institution that is penny-pinching. SO the people they are hurting is the people who might be helping Sun the most.
SGI has lost all their jedi developers, and as Eugenia mentions how Dominic Giampaolo went from SGI, to Be. Dominic now works for Google, as of 2 years ago. But that isn't the only person who has jumped ship at SGI, countless other faces, and names no longer reside at the old 'cool place to work'. The stock price was a penny-stock for awhile. Their hardware bussiness is lagging behind, and basically not moving forward. There has not been any new inovations from SGI in the past 3 or 4 years. In short, the industry finally caught up with SGI, and they have lost their graphics nitche. What Eugina doesnt' know, among many many many things, is that Sun is filling the void that was left open by SGI.
Anyways, his review of Irix is a version that is now old. It would be one thing if this was a hot new release of Irix 6.6 (non-existent), or some major point release. This version is a maintance release, and is old now. We have version 6.5.18, as of a week ago or so.... SGI sent me the new disc's. Also, booting the system up, and playing with the OpenGL crap is lame. Sorry, but it might impress an idiot, or people who have never played quakeII. Mozilla is not that impressive, and neither is the port of KDE or Gnome for Irix. These are things that, well, are not very interesting considering these tools run on just about all *nix variants now. Only a noobie would think otherwise. His bench mark analysis is to simply say "x seems to run faster on this old box", with no numbers or anything. Basically there is no relevance to his claims.
What I see is a guy who got a new toy to write about, and is all wet behind the ears. I use SGI computers evry day, and they are not all that! I have everything from O2, indiego, to bing honking 12-way Onyx clusters.
So let me explain what is nice about IRIX, for somebody that really does use it, and isn't still inthe first day experience level. Think about it, when you first tried Linux, or FreeBSd for the first time, as in never touched *nix before. If red hat was your first distro, say aorund version 7.*... your review might look something like Eugina's: noobie'ish! Sure, you can click'ity'clickty around the menus, launch softwareyou have never seen beofre.... ohh... ahhh...ooo.... wow! Whatever! The good thing about Irix is the fact that evrything is doable with a pretty gui tool. It was apparent from the early stages in Irix that people at that company were tired of the command line. For example, their package manager (aka software install tool) swmgr is fully graphical, and probably the best software installer for Unix there is, hands down. The upside is they also have another just-as-good version of the tool for the commandline. Sun could take some hints from what SGI has done inteh swmgr tool. For example, it has pie charts of filesystem utilization, with colors that represent what the other softwre packs take up, and what it would take to isntall this new peice. Everything look perfect. On the other hand, the X window system in general is lacking, the toolchest is gay. Lets face it, the SGI default desktop is kinda bleak, and empty. Maybe I'm a bit too used to CDE, KDE, or whatever.... but the first thing everyone I know does is install KDE to get some real work done. The day to day work of a developer wis what makesIrix nice to work on. The diff tool highlites the changes in files in an inteligent way, the ps program is graphical, or not, and is easy to spot problems with. The NIS, NFS, AFS work with gui tools to make things easy, yet all these tools could be used in a command line only mode. For those subterainian-commandlien dwealers, your still taken care of, and nicely too.
XSF is not like BFS, no matter how much Eugina want to think they are the same. They are not! It is true that XFS is more unixlike where bfs was more Be like. Both are 64 bit namespace safe, both have extensible attributes, but on XFS you have to really work hard to mess with these features. This is one area SGI needs to improve. The tools that ship with IBM's JFS are the best, but the features of XFS are probably better than JFS. Basically put, SGI XFS just works, without much tweaking. Or if you want, you can mess with the XFS. These days SGI is getting out of the graphics biz, and moving into the storage server biz. So maybe they will improve the XFS options/administration.
Hahaha.... yeah.. I know what you mean by "uptime".
Sorry if I was a bit abrasive in my post too. =) I agree that sometimes the editors post things that are blantant advertisments, or endup being good advertisment for something they might have inocently thought was interesting enough to post. But I don't think this was one of them, and in general the editors just repost stuff submited by a user, and many time the user just copies/pastes directly from the original blurb (an advertisment). Oh well.
WE do not hate the GPL, and that is a big missconception about BSD folks. We simply preffer to use a license that is FREE, as in freedom. We hardly think that any license that REQUIRES somebody , or FORCES somebody, to release source code is actually a free license. Things that have requirments are not actually free (by definition), no matter how much they say they are. However, that is not to say that when we look the Free Software Foundation (henceforth FSF), and all the good work they have under their umbrella that we are not happy. Indeed, we are very gratefull for the good work provided by FSF-GPL derived works. We do not think it is bad to include GNU awk, cpio, diff, groff,patch, sdiff, texinfo, bc, cvs, diff3, gzip , perl, send-pr, binutils, dc, gperf, ld, ptx, sort, as, cc, dialog, grep, man, rcs, and tar. Thsi is actually just a few of the quality apps that we have imported from the GNU operating environment. So you see, many of the apps are critical to a functional system. Indeed, many of the app's in GNU/finux (cryptonomicon pun) are derived for BSD, so all is good in the land of open source.
That is true... they seem to mention in the translation that they are worried about products from the USA. The article eluded to the defence sector of China. So maybe.
So they deliberally let an airplane crash at a US spy plane, even though they are aware of that fact that they were throwing a bag of money away (planes cost money) and will recieve all sorts of bad publicity from around the world? Isn't that kinda stupid? No matter how many expensive material is in that spy plane, they lose lots money and material. The government may not be perfect but they're not stupid either. And how about the pilot? Do you think he would agree on throwing his life away by crashing into another airplane?
Um, yeah...actually... that is apparently what happened! The pilot is a loose canon, or rather was a loose canon... but who cares. He was a moron, and probably should have never been allowed to fly. Then again, he was probably one of Chinas top guns! Who cares! The point I'm making is that China has no care about international treaties, or international law. Stop dwealling on the small details of the above... and get it into your head that what I'm reffering to is the result of what that moron pilot did, not the cause. China showed their true face in the matters when they handled the SOS situation they put the USA spy plane into. Again, they showed their willignness, and eagerness, to rape and pillage the property of the USA (from the spy plane). If its not turning a blind eye to piracy, or stealling secrets from Los Alimos, it is taking advantage of a SOS situation.
So finally China is designing a silicone design of their own, no doubt they have the ability to x-ray the chips they get from the West and reverse engineer their own. The fact that they are not is my point! it seems kinda double faced of China to finally take the high road, or rather claim to be in the veil of a RISC design. When RISC is in fact a very encumbered design too. Then again, the translation is kinda bad too.
But you have to consider the theam of the site. "News for Nerds, stuff that matters". I would think that saving money in an ApacheCon is news that matters to a nerd. If you don't fall into that catagory, then why are you here? Besides, technical conventions, especially ones devoted to open source software is hardly an advertisment when somebody post that the registration is still available. It more like advocacy, and that is another part of Slashdot. Besides, this fell under the apache section of news, it didn't even hit the main page, unless you configured your account to show EVERYTHING that passes thru the gates, and that is not the default settings, nor encouraged. So since this is news for the Apache folks, then that means your just a troll, right? And I've just fell for your bait, damn-it!
Gosh, why don't they just embed a smart card under the skin in or around the palm area. I mean, what is to prevent me from beating up the guy with the palm this mouse system wants to use, and then forcing his hand ont he mouse to circumvent the security system? Besides, who uses a mouse in VI anyways. Real men just yank and paste lines with YY/P commands. Oh wait, thats right... the drivers for this only work in Windoze!
This is heading down the off-topic road, but what the heck.
No, What I was referring to is that they were well outside the China territorials waters, albeit barely.
If a Thief, in this case a USA spy plane, were orbiting my house and intercepting my cell phone calls, or monitoring the key-strokes of my wireless keyboards.... there is nothing I could do about it. Oh wait, thats right, I could jump into my jet plane and crash into them, and then steal their crashed plane and hock all the expensive parts before I give it back.
No... this would never happen, right? My point was that a country that would allow something like that to happen in the first place, not even mentioning the way China turns a blind eye to software piracy, is basically an example of why they don't respect international laws, treaties, and basically anything that isn't immediatly gratifing to China's regime.
For many years China has been forced to steal most of their technologies. They have always been playing catch up with the westrn world. Finally they are now starting to develop a space program, an improved nucler arrsenal, a telecommunications network, and now silicon. Now it funny how the article is so careful to mention that this chip does't violate any IP of Intel because it is a RISC desing, and what I'm saying is why is that even an issue? This is an issue that has never stopped China before! SO then why is china doing this, because they have a notion of actually selling this crappy chip in the USA? Possibly, but they what void would this new chip be filling? Or is the Chines plan more forward thinking, and they plan to outright destroy the USA chip market with tones of super cheap Intel knock offs?
YOu, dear sir/madam, should be mod'd up. The reality, as you point out, is that the people in China is mainly poor, and don't have the ability to own a computer. The people who do own computers are typically in the Chines Military, or goverment high-ups, or just simply lucky. Actually, another big issue is that computers, and computer hardware, and computer languages; are in general a very ASCII thing (aka english). What I'm getting at is the social-economic issues that prevent a common person in China from owning an expensive imported computer. But what is really sad is many of the parts that are found in the imported computer were actually fabricated in China, or assembled there... then sent over seas, and then shipped back over seas to be sold with a markup. Not really that bad, but the fact is that many of the components are fabricated in Chaina, and assymbled in Taiwan, and then shipped to America.
So when we see a flood of virii out of China, and wonder why, or where they come from. We have to suspect the Chines goverment as beign the instigator. I talk about the flood of attacks on Taiwan from the mainland of China thru the internet. So anyways, China needs its own computer infrastructure, just like they need their own everything else. As a country, it gives them security and a bit of self reliance. As far as exporting the crappy mips wanna-be RISC chips, who cares? Frankly we in the USA enjoys an abundance of absurdly bad chips already without the bad chips of China flooding our markets. Frankly, China will have a hard enough time selling the chips to their own people, despite selling them to over seas customers. Sure, the folks in the USA inteligence community would probably love to get their hands on a few to test things like their power to decypher RSA keys, or simulate the weather. But the chips poses no real threat to the USA, except that maybe a few sales will be lost to the fact that the China goverment will force its infrastructure to utilize these chips instead of the more expensive forgin chips from the USA and Europe.
Since when has IP ever been an issue in The peoples Republic of China? They don't obey international laws. They have jet fighter pilots who like to fly too close and crash into USA spy planes. They have a thing for stealling software like we could only imagine in the USA. They have the comfort of not having to worry aout IP-cops in China. They distribute pirate copies of MS code like you could not belive. To read this article and see it talk about being worried about Intel's IP on processor technologies, and then be so naive to claim that since they are based on a RISC arch that they are immune. Ha! The fact is that even RISC's are entangled in IP. The only reason they can get away with certain architecture designes is because China doesn't have to obey forign IP rights. Another issue mentioned inthe article is the idea taht China has defence issues to worry about, and the reliance on forgine tech is bad for them. This I belive more than anything else. We, the USA, asked Sony to stop fabricating the Emotion chip in China fabs because it is actually capable of being used in guidance systems for rockets, and capable of being installed in parrallel to form supper computers. So China needs its own processor technologies, and they need to coem true with the notion that they dont' actualyl care about the USA laws, or existing tech in the field of proc fab.
I will CONTINUE to support free music until the "BIG ARTISTS" and the RIAA decides that what they are doing is DUMB as HELL.
You mean to say that you will continue to support illeagal activity, and the destruction of the music industry as it currently stands. By the same token, youi also then support the motivatiosn of the RIAA to install their DRM technologies in the next gen music distribution formats. LEt me remind you that there is no such thing as FREE MUSIC from a free lable, and what your talking about is you will continue to support stolen music.
If contracting HIV came were possible from copyright violations, instead of sex, you would be a AIDS crack-whore needle freak.
It is true that copywrite violation is a statutory crime, unlike violent crimes, and by that token most folks feel it is simply OK to break the law. Just because it is possible to download music doens't mean it is actually ok to do so, no matter how much you pretend it is, or justify it, or whatever. What you call supporting free music is just a cop-out to make your crimes seem alright in your mind. Finding a piece of crack rock on the street is also a very simple minded thing, but picking it up is against the law as it is possestion of a controlled substance, as is the same when you download a copy-protected work.
Now it is true the copywrite law suck int he usa, and so do patent laws. Maybe destroying the music industry is you form of civil disobediance, or whatever. How cares! The fact is that this Bon Jovi CD is being dellayed because of a patent issue that is simply crazy. This patent is akin to having a patent on signing your name on paper, yet since it is involving electronics/technologies, etc... it is now something patentable. This is akin to patent on whiping my ass with your idiot resume with a technological robot arm.
Think about it this way. That card that is shiped with the bon jovi cd, in the future that might be some sort fo smart card with a special decrypt key to decypher the encrypted music on the disc. Think your gonna have kazaa trading then? No! The fact that this method is not involving DRM is good, the fact that your too stupid to understand that is bad! Your the motivation behind suck ideas. The problem is too many of you type folks exist (the ignorant, and arrogant).
Now I might be a bit of a conservative scientist, but it seems to me in other situatiosn the chance to convert that heat energy into tangabel other forms of energy would be a good oportunity. For example, the heat could be used to warm he jet fuel just prior to it's insertion into the combustion chamber, thus increasing its efficiency of the combustion. Warm fuel burns more efficient than cold fuel!
There also exist gell packs that can absorb heat and convert it to electrical power. Not that the JFS is in short supply of electricity, with its turbo jet engines spinning shafts that then connect to static generators... but wouldn't it be possible to recycle some of the spent power back into the laser?
If heat is such a problem, it would seem to me the laser could only be used in shorts bursts. Like less than a second, and no more than 1-1/2 second.
Not to sound harsh, or critical... but 100 kilo-watts of laser isn't very impressive either. The fun lasers are in the giga-watt range. High megawatt, and gigawatt lasers are used for welding, so I don't see this being much use except to maybe disable the sensor systems, or blind the enemy troops. In fact, I doubt 100 kilowatt is the real spec being used. I would venture that a much more powerfull, and secret, version is being developed.
The best place to stick a laser is on C41 type plane. In other words a big plane that coudl house multiple laser mirrors, and not have to worry about the heat issues sicne they coudl just pass some of the thin air over the heat exchangers. That woudl be a good replacment for the giant gattlin guns used on the place, not to mention replacing all the ammo they need to carry. Laseres, after all, are very reusable!
Usage of these weapons is actually restricted by international treaty. The reason is that high intensity light systems could be used to permanently blind the foot soldiers, and that is considered unsportsman like warfare. Sorta like the way nukes are considered unsportsman like too! But lasers, like any other bright light, does't just kill people. They can blind them, and permanently too. That is considered to be off limites. Now melting the armor on a vehicle is fair game, and if you happen to be looking in the laser and manage to not get your skin instantly burned (not likely), but you go blind; your fair game cuz you were sitting on an legitimate target (the armor vehicle). But swooping down on populated areas, and then sweaping the crowded areas with bright lights is bad.
The treaty was a bit unclear, and unfourtunatly I don't have the deatials, but as I recall it might be offlimites to use the laser to blind enemy pilots too. As in shining the beam inot he cockpit of the enemy jet! I guess it depends ont he situation, and the combat senarios.... but we are realyl treading new ground here!
"Condesending unix users" is the term I used to hear flote around. You also have to remember that FreeBSD didn't exist until 94, and linux started in like 92'ish. At the time, people would use BSDos as a cheap alternative to SunOS, and at the time SUNos was still BSD driven. Later on when Sun went to a SYSv frame-work from att, things started to change. Solaris hit the scean like a shockwave, and FreeBSD, and NetBSD were back to obscurity. In america, a bunch of small dial-up ISP's started to use FreeBSD as an alternative to Sun Unix, since it was free. This is what drove the BSD's to the point they are now. Now we have a much larger user base, and yet we are still supposedly dead according to your typical slashdot troll. WE have conventions each year where we decide what features will be worked on in the next year, and what features are good enought to insert into the existing dist's. We have heritage that dates back to Bill Joy implementing TCP/IP into the kernel, and everything in between then and now. Most importantly, we do not exist on a virus like license that entraps developers who wish to modify code (yes, I'm talking about GPL).
It is true that FreeBSD development is more based on a clique of developers than a rag-tag group of hackers that work on Linux distributions. AT one time, the clique was very exclusive, but now it is basically like the way it was for Finux in 97. WE are always gainning more steam.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean the Earth will want to spin the other direction, or is the Earths spin controlled by other forces, and not magnatism? Besides, what magnetic pole is currently the positive side, and what is the negative side? Also, How would this affect the commercial airlines with their fancy expensive compases? Does it really matter considering that the Earth might have problems when the magetic sphere of protection lets the evil radiation monsters thru the window? We might all jsut get cancer and die, right?
yeah, I know its not on my end. I blasted my local cache, and I have control of the corprate proxy on the perimeter. So I duno, and I got a screen shot now to prove the non-belivers. The direct links work though.
Thank you, and now I belive it is not a hoax.
I simply don't know why my browser (Linux-Mozzila on 4.7-stable) is not showing me the linkage. Oh well... I cleared my cache, and reloaded the page a few time just to make sure. I should make a screen shot to prove the na-sayers that I'm not blind!
Anyways, thx for the direct link! =)
Ah...NO... the links you mention do NOT exist. At least not that I can see in, or above, the 3rd step. For those that are wondering, the link above will warp you to a page with three steps: products, part#, and OS. Looking in the Linux area only shows stuff for Finux distro, and there is not mention of FreeBSD!
So at this point, this still looks like a hoax to me! However, is is well known that nvidia IS working on a FreeBSD native driver. It just doesn't look like its finished yet. No Nvidia people have posted anythign to the -STABLE mailling list yet. Mind you no employee's of Nvidia have. Other post's there could be from the same people trolling this hoax.
We BSD folk have been waitting for this, because we like to play Quake too! The bad part is where are the drivers? Nvidia's web page only show's the Finux variety. Hopefully the website will update soon. There is no mention of this on the FreeBSD -stable mail-list from any Nvidia folks, so I'm a bit skeptable. The only mention on the FreeBSD list thus far is also pointing to the same website, with not metion of FreeBSD driveres.
I fail to see how this is an issue when you use a non-Microsoft environment. Will the field service-dude know how to install this software under wine's emulation? Will he even know what wine is? Do I even have Wine installed? Is there a MAC or Unix version of these software tools? What about the possibility to format Windows imediatly after the service-man leaves the room?
;)
Is this a notion of you must submit to the service man installing software before he leaves, or is this a notion of you must run this software to use the network? I think the later is highly unlikely, and the former to be part of the burocratic tangle inside the network companies.
Every time I call the cable company, I have to explain to them that my computer is a FreeBSD box with an AMD 100Mhz 486 chip with 64Mb of memory. Then they explain to me that they only support XYZ setup, and I have to explain to them that I'm talking about my router, and I have XYZ behind it. I thne have to explain to them the way DHCP works, and how that is all that they actually require. Once your have them spell bound with ignorant IP terminology, they tend to shutup and go away. I figure the same jedi mind trick can be done with the field service people.
The GPL might be good for the developer who writes the code originally, but it is bad for the public at large. You have to understand taht there is nothing inthe GPL that says I have to give you the source code for free! the condition is that i have to make the source code available, but not really for free download, or whatever. The code writen by goverment should have zero strings attached, as in a purely free license. After all, a license that has "requirements", and "conditions" is not free as in freedom, not in the true sense of the term. That is why the BSD style license is so good since it only exists to confirm the code is free (as in freedom), and the zero liability. I would think its is reasonable to say that goverment assigned contracts that involve the generation of source code should be mandated to use a goverment approved lisence that benifites the public. By "public" I also mean to include the commercial interest in our society. A goverment should nto have to make available changes or modifications to source code that it payed a contractor to write! Furthermore, a goverment should not release source code that forces it citizens to make changes available. Would these citizens being violating a stautory law, or a small-claims court battle with the US goverment? Don't get me wrong, the GPL isn't all bad. After all it does do what it designed to do very well; protect the selfish desire of the developers to steal that improvments that other people make to the code that appears to be available for free, but really isn't. =) The GPL is good for one thing, education. It is a good way to make code available so pople can read it, learn from it, and possibly write source code in the BSD license that is FREE, or NOT.
It just goes to show, if you cannot beat them; blur, subvert, entagle, go to bed with, and later on take a knife to their neck. This is one good way to get their roots into an otherwise concreate group who seem to stand firmly on open source. Heck, making Internet Explorer free (as in cost) utterly destroyed Netscape in the end, and now free (as in freedom) software is starting to destroy Microsoft. Kinda Ironic huh? Well it won't be so easy on this side of the camp for them to subvert. We can see it coming, and if Microsoft is so anti Finux, then why have a company contribute to that very same agenda they are scared of? Is this an "embrace, and exploite" method we have not seen before? Who knows, maybee MS will write their own Finux distro in the end! har... har..
It is also said that the US State Dept. has no legal recource for refusing a visa, as in the Justice dept has no leverage with them to do anything. So thins might be Powell's way of asserting a forced verdict in this case. This might also set a precendence in the world-wide court, if we USA folks can procescute outsiders, yet we refuse these bad folks entry, what is the point? Guilty without trial?
Doesn't seem fair to me!
your kinda right, er.... correct. FreeBSD has two systems of software distribution, ports, and packages. Ports is always a good thing if your into automation of downloading/checking for dependancies/building/installing software in its most fundamental way. Packages, on the other hand, have already been through that process, as in somebody (or you) has already compiled the source code into usable binary exacutable. The packages are more comparable to an RPM as they have the ability to check for dependancies for dynamically linked binaries, or whatever, and know how to install themselves. FreeBSD packages are every bit the equal of a RPM. The key differnce of your RPMs, and the FreeBSD ports/package collection is that FreeBSD is centralized. As in we have a big team of peopel that maintain the ports, and add new ports all the time. When software becomes a port, it also becomes a package since every freebsd port has the "make package" target in their Makefiles. When a new release of FreeBSD is about to be made public, the entire ports tree is compiled down into packages and put onto a set of cdroms. Well, not all the ports are, just the ones with licenses that permite such redistribution, currently over 8000 titles! PAckages are a nice way for administrators to build once, and install many places on their networks/clusters.
Interesting, it seems sun is going to sell SOlaris 9 for $99 USD. But what about all those grand plans they had for Linux? I mean, at one point Sun was going to make Linux kernel + Solaris userland to be the x86 mega system. That way Solaris on x86 would have all the advantages of open source driver development. Lets face it, this is a much better idea that the one currently being driven my Sun to sell Solaris 9 on Intel, and just continue to ride sick horse. Going down this path means more money is being spent at Sun on the Intel side of things, and that takes away from the Sparc side of stuff. Linux kernel already has like 10x more supported hardware that the Solaris kernel. Yeah, the Solaris engineers can look at the Linux kernel and reverse engineer code for their own, but isn't that just stupid when you could just have the linux kernel? Besides, the people who use x86 solaris is mainly schools that teach unix to students, and cannot afford a sparc box in front of each student, or some other institution that is penny-pinching. SO the people they are hurting is the people who might be helping Sun the most.
SGI has lost all their jedi developers, and as Eugenia mentions how Dominic Giampaolo went from SGI, to Be. Dominic now works for Google, as of 2 years ago. But that isn't the only person who has jumped ship at SGI, countless other faces, and names no longer reside at the old 'cool place to work'. The stock price was a penny-stock for awhile. Their hardware bussiness is lagging behind, and basically not moving forward. There has not been any new inovations from SGI in the past 3 or 4 years. In short, the industry finally caught up with SGI, and they have lost their graphics nitche. What Eugina doesnt' know, among many many many things, is that Sun is filling the void that was left open by SGI.
Anyways, his review of Irix is a version that is now old. It would be one thing if this was a hot new release of Irix 6.6 (non-existent), or some major point release. This version is a maintance release, and is old now. We have version 6.5.18, as of a week ago or so.... SGI sent me the new disc's. Also, booting the system up, and playing with the OpenGL crap is lame. Sorry, but it might impress an idiot, or people who have never played quakeII. Mozilla is not that impressive, and neither is the port of KDE or Gnome for Irix. These are things that, well, are not very interesting considering these tools run on just about all *nix variants now. Only a noobie would think otherwise. His bench mark analysis is to simply say "x seems to run faster on this old box", with no numbers or anything. Basically there is no relevance to his claims.
What I see is a guy who got a new toy to write about, and is all wet behind the ears. I use SGI computers evry day, and they are not all that! I have everything from O2, indiego, to bing honking 12-way Onyx clusters.
So let me explain what is nice about IRIX, for somebody that really does use it, and isn't still inthe first day experience level. Think about it, when you first tried Linux, or FreeBSd for the first time, as in never touched *nix before. If red hat was your first distro, say aorund version 7.*... your review might look something like Eugina's: noobie'ish! Sure, you can click'ity'clickty around the menus, launch softwareyou have never seen beofre.... ohh... ahhh...ooo.... wow! Whatever! The good thing about Irix is the fact that evrything is doable with a pretty gui tool. It was apparent from the early stages in Irix that people at that company were tired of the command line. For example, their package manager (aka software install tool) swmgr is fully graphical, and probably the best software installer for Unix there is, hands down. The upside is they also have another just-as-good version of the tool for the commandline. Sun could take some hints from what SGI has done inteh swmgr tool. For example, it has pie charts of filesystem utilization, with colors that represent what the other softwre packs take up, and what it would take to isntall this new peice. Everything look perfect. On the other hand, the X window system in general is lacking, the toolchest is gay. Lets face it, the SGI default desktop is kinda bleak, and empty. Maybe I'm a bit too used to CDE, KDE, or whatever.... but the first thing everyone I know does is install KDE to get some real work done. The day to day work of a developer wis what makesIrix nice to work on. The diff tool highlites the changes in files in an inteligent way, the ps program is graphical, or not, and is easy to spot problems with. The NIS, NFS, AFS work with gui tools to make things easy, yet all these tools could be used in a command line only mode. For those subterainian-commandlien dwealers, your still taken care of, and nicely too.
XSF is not like BFS, no matter how much Eugina want to think they are the same. They are not! It is true that XFS is more unixlike where bfs was more Be like. Both are 64 bit namespace safe, both have extensible attributes, but on XFS you have to really work hard to mess with these features. This is one area SGI needs to improve. The tools that ship with IBM's JFS are the best, but the features of XFS are probably better than JFS. Basically put, SGI XFS just works, without much tweaking. Or if you want, you can mess with the XFS. These days SGI is getting out of the graphics biz, and moving into the storage server biz. So maybe they will improve the XFS options/administration.
Hahaha.... yeah.. I know what you mean by "uptime".
Sorry if I was a bit abrasive in my post too. =) I agree that sometimes the editors post things that are blantant advertisments, or endup being good advertisment for something they might have inocently thought was interesting enough to post. But I don't think this was one of them, and in general the editors just repost stuff submited by a user, and many time the user just copies/pastes directly from the original blurb (an advertisment). Oh well.
WE do not hate the GPL, and that is a big missconception about BSD folks. We simply preffer to use a license that is FREE, as in freedom. We hardly think that any license that REQUIRES somebody , or FORCES somebody, to release source code is actually a free license. Things that have requirments are not actually free (by definition), no matter how much they say they are. However, that is not to say that when we look the Free Software Foundation (henceforth FSF), and all the good work they have under their umbrella that we are not happy. Indeed, we are very gratefull for the good work provided by FSF-GPL derived works. We do not think it is bad to include GNU awk, cpio, diff, groff ,patch, sdiff, texinfo, bc, cvs, diff3, gzip , perl, send-pr, binutils, dc, gperf, ld, ptx, sort, as, cc, dialog, grep, man, rcs, and tar. Thsi is actually just a few of the quality apps that we have imported from the GNU operating environment. So you see, many of the apps are critical to a functional system. Indeed, many of the app's in GNU/finux (cryptonomicon pun) are derived for BSD, so all is good in the land of open source.
That is true... they seem to mention in the translation that they are worried about products from the USA. The article eluded to the defence sector of China. So maybe.
Um, yeah...actually
So finally China is designing a silicone design of their own, no doubt they have the ability to x-ray the chips they get from the West and reverse engineer their own. The fact that they are not is my point! it seems kinda double faced of China to finally take the high road, or rather claim to be in the veil of a RISC design. When RISC is in fact a very encumbered design too. Then again, the translation is kinda bad too.
But you have to consider the theam of the site. "News for Nerds, stuff that matters". I would think that saving money in an ApacheCon is news that matters to a nerd. If you don't fall into that catagory, then why are you here? Besides, technical conventions, especially ones devoted to open source software is hardly an advertisment when somebody post that the registration is still available. It more like advocacy, and that is another part of Slashdot. Besides, this fell under the apache section of news, it didn't even hit the main page, unless you configured your account to show EVERYTHING that passes thru the gates, and that is not the default settings, nor encouraged. So since this is news for the Apache folks, then that means your just a troll, right? And I've just fell for your bait, damn-it!
Gosh, why don't they just embed a smart card under the skin in or around the palm area. I mean, what is to prevent me from beating up the guy with the palm this mouse system wants to use, and then forcing his hand ont he mouse to circumvent the security system? Besides, who uses a mouse in VI anyways. Real men just yank and paste lines with YY/P commands. Oh wait, thats right... the drivers for this only work in Windoze!
This is heading down the off-topic road, but what the heck.
No, What I was referring to is that they were well outside the China territorials waters, albeit barely.
If a Thief, in this case a USA spy plane, were orbiting my house and intercepting my cell phone calls, or monitoring the key-strokes of my wireless keyboards.... there is nothing I could do about it. Oh wait, thats right, I could jump into my jet plane and crash into them, and then steal their crashed plane and hock all the expensive parts before I give it back.
No... this would never happen, right? My point was that a country that would allow something like that to happen in the first place, not even mentioning the way China turns a blind eye to software piracy, is basically an example of why they don't respect international laws, treaties, and basically anything that isn't immediatly gratifing to China's regime.
For many years China has been forced to steal most of their technologies. They have always been playing catch up with the westrn world. Finally they are now starting to develop a space program, an improved nucler arrsenal, a telecommunications network, and now silicon. Now it funny how the article is so careful to mention that this chip does't violate any IP of Intel because it is a RISC desing, and what I'm saying is why is that even an issue? This is an issue that has never stopped China before! SO then why is china doing this, because they have a notion of actually selling this crappy chip in the USA? Possibly, but they what void would this new chip be filling? Or is the Chines plan more forward thinking, and they plan to outright destroy the USA chip market with tones of super cheap Intel knock offs?
EXACTLY
YOu, dear sir/madam, should be mod'd up. The reality, as you point out, is that the people in China is mainly poor, and don't have the ability to own a computer. The people who do own computers are typically in the Chines Military, or goverment high-ups, or just simply lucky. Actually, another big issue is that computers, and computer hardware, and computer languages; are in general a very ASCII thing (aka english). What I'm getting at is the social-economic issues that prevent a common person in China from owning an expensive imported computer. But what is really sad is many of the parts that are found in the imported computer were actually fabricated in China, or assembled there... then sent over seas, and then shipped back over seas to be sold with a markup. Not really that bad, but the fact is that many of the components are fabricated in Chaina, and assymbled in Taiwan, and then shipped to America.
So when we see a flood of virii out of China, and wonder why, or where they come from. We have to suspect the Chines goverment as beign the instigator. I talk about the flood of attacks on Taiwan from the mainland of China thru the internet. So anyways, China needs its own computer infrastructure, just like they need their own everything else. As a country, it gives them security and a bit of self reliance. As far as exporting the crappy mips wanna-be RISC chips, who cares? Frankly we in the USA enjoys an abundance of absurdly bad chips already without the bad chips of China flooding our markets. Frankly, China will have a hard enough time selling the chips to their own people, despite selling them to over seas customers. Sure, the folks in the USA inteligence community would probably love to get their hands on a few to test things like their power to decypher RSA keys, or simulate the weather. But the chips poses no real threat to the USA, except that maybe a few sales will be lost to the fact that the China goverment will force its infrastructure to utilize these chips instead of the more expensive forgin chips from the USA and Europe.
Since when has IP ever been an issue in The peoples Republic of China? They don't obey international laws. They have jet fighter pilots who like to fly too close and crash into USA spy planes. They have a thing for stealling software like we could only imagine in the USA. They have the comfort of not having to worry aout IP-cops in China. They distribute pirate copies of MS code like you could not belive. To read this article and see it talk about being worried about Intel's IP on processor technologies, and then be so naive to claim that since they are based on a RISC arch that they are immune. Ha! The fact is that even RISC's are entangled in IP. The only reason they can get away with certain architecture designes is because China doesn't have to obey forign IP rights. Another issue mentioned inthe article is the idea taht China has defence issues to worry about, and the reliance on forgine tech is bad for them. This I belive more than anything else. We, the USA, asked Sony to stop fabricating the Emotion chip in China fabs because it is actually capable of being used in guidance systems for rockets, and capable of being installed in parrallel to form supper computers. So China needs its own processor technologies, and they need to coem true with the notion that they dont' actualyl care about the USA laws, or existing tech in the field of proc fab.
You mean to say that you will continue to support illeagal activity, and the destruction of the music industry as it currently stands. By the same token, youi also then support the motivatiosn of the RIAA to install their DRM technologies in the next gen music distribution formats. LEt me remind you that there is no such thing as FREE MUSIC from a free lable, and what your talking about is you will continue to support stolen music.
If contracting HIV came were possible from copyright violations, instead of sex, you would be a AIDS crack-whore needle freak.
It is true that copywrite violation is a statutory crime, unlike violent crimes, and by that token most folks feel it is simply OK to break the law. Just because it is possible to download music doens't mean it is actually ok to do so, no matter how much you pretend it is, or justify it, or whatever. What you call supporting free music is just a cop-out to make your crimes seem alright in your mind. Finding a piece of crack rock on the street is also a very simple minded thing, but picking it up is against the law as it is possestion of a controlled substance, as is the same when you download a copy-protected work.
Now it is true the copywrite law suck int he usa, and so do patent laws. Maybe destroying the music industry is you form of civil disobediance, or whatever. How cares! The fact is that this Bon Jovi CD is being dellayed because of a patent issue that is simply crazy. This patent is akin to having a patent on signing your name on paper, yet since it is involving electronics/technologies, etc... it is now something patentable. This is akin to patent on whiping my ass with your idiot resume with a technological robot arm.
Think about it this way. That card that is shiped with the bon jovi cd, in the future that might be some sort fo smart card with a special decrypt key to decypher the encrypted music on the disc. Think your gonna have kazaa trading then? No! The fact that this method is not involving DRM is good, the fact that your too stupid to understand that is bad! Your the motivation behind suck ideas. The problem is too many of you type folks exist (the ignorant, and arrogant).
Now I might be a bit of a conservative scientist, but it seems to me in other situatiosn the chance to convert that heat energy into tangabel other forms of energy would be a good oportunity. For example, the heat could be used to warm he jet fuel just prior to it's insertion into the combustion chamber, thus increasing its efficiency of the combustion. Warm fuel burns more efficient than cold fuel!
There also exist gell packs that can absorb heat and convert it to electrical power. Not that the JFS is in short supply of electricity, with its turbo jet engines spinning shafts that then connect to static generators... but wouldn't it be possible to recycle some of the spent power back into the laser?
If heat is such a problem, it would seem to me the laser could only be used in shorts bursts. Like less than a second, and no more than 1-1/2 second.
Not to sound harsh, or critical... but 100 kilo-watts of laser isn't very impressive either. The fun lasers are in the giga-watt range. High megawatt, and gigawatt lasers are used for welding, so I don't see this being much use except to maybe disable the sensor systems, or blind the enemy troops. In fact, I doubt 100 kilowatt is the real spec being used. I would venture that a much more powerfull, and secret, version is being developed.
The best place to stick a laser is on C41 type plane. In other words a big plane that coudl house multiple laser mirrors, and not have to worry about the heat issues sicne they coudl just pass some of the thin air over the heat exchangers. That woudl be a good replacment for the giant gattlin guns used on the place, not to mention replacing all the ammo they need to carry. Laseres, after all, are very reusable!
Usage of these weapons is actually restricted by international treaty. The reason is that high intensity light systems could be used to permanently blind the foot soldiers, and that is considered unsportsman like warfare. Sorta like the way nukes are considered unsportsman like too! But lasers, like any other bright light, does't just kill people. They can blind them, and permanently too. That is considered to be off limites. Now melting the armor on a vehicle is fair game, and if you happen to be looking in the laser and manage to not get your skin instantly burned (not likely), but you go blind; your fair game cuz you were sitting on an legitimate target (the armor vehicle). But swooping down on populated areas, and then sweaping the crowded areas with bright lights is bad.
The treaty was a bit unclear, and unfourtunatly I don't have the deatials, but as I recall it might be offlimites to use the laser to blind enemy pilots too. As in shining the beam inot he cockpit of the enemy jet! I guess it depends ont he situation, and the combat senarios.... but we are realyl treading new ground here!
Yeah, this is true...
"Condesending unix users" is the term I used to hear flote around. You also have to remember that FreeBSD didn't exist until 94, and linux started in like 92'ish. At the time, people would use BSDos as a cheap alternative to SunOS, and at the time SUNos was still BSD driven. Later on when Sun went to a SYSv frame-work from att, things started to change. Solaris hit the scean like a shockwave, and FreeBSD, and NetBSD were back to obscurity. In america, a bunch of small dial-up ISP's started to use FreeBSD as an alternative to Sun Unix, since it was free. This is what drove the BSD's to the point they are now. Now we have a much larger user base, and yet we are still supposedly dead according to your typical slashdot troll. WE have conventions each year where we decide what features will be worked on in the next year, and what features are good enought to insert into the existing dist's. We have heritage that dates back to Bill Joy implementing TCP/IP into the kernel, and everything in between then and now. Most importantly, we do not exist on a virus like license that entraps developers who wish to modify code (yes, I'm talking about GPL).
It is true that FreeBSD development is more based on a clique of developers than a rag-tag group of hackers that work on Linux distributions. AT one time, the clique was very exclusive, but now it is basically like the way it was for Finux in 97. WE are always gainning more steam.